LONDON,
UK (Klezmatics PR) - The Klezmatics�known for their unique blend of
melodic mysticism and improvisational activism�have once again turned
their music inside out, exposing the complexity of Jewish identity,
Black identity, human identity.
Brother Moses Smote the
Water�their March 8, 2005 release on Piranha Musik (distributed by
Harmonia Mundi)�teams them with Joshua
Nelson and jazz singer/organist
Kathryn Farmer. This first live Klezmatics recording alternates between
age-old Hebrew Passover songs, Nelson's own brand of "kosher gospel,"
and traditional Yiddish Klezmatic anthems. The
Brother Moses Smote the
Water tour will be presented in Berkeley, Napa, NYC, and select major
cities in April 2005.
Nelson descends from a long line of Black
Jews, their very existence calling into question the dichotomous
black/white thinking typically placed on religion, race, and culture in
America. He posits that his Jewish heritage may go as far back as the
ancient
Second
Temple of Jerusalem. "My great, great grandmother practiced a very
primitive Judaism similar to the Jewish Ethiopians and the Lembas of
Southern Africa,"
Nelson explains. "For example, to this day we
celebrate the New Year during Passover in the spring as the Torah says.
Whereas most Western Jews celebrate the New Year during Rosh Hashanah
in the fall as the later Rabbinic teachings say. Somehow the line of
Judaism I come from didn't follow Rabbinic Judaism. Regardless, there
have been
Black Jews for centuries."
But Nelson's gospel singing
only goes as far back as his grandmother's Mahalia Jackson record,
which he listened to at age eight. "I make Jewish music and give it a
soul sound," he says. "They call it the gospel sound. But technically
it is soul Jewish music. If you can be
Black and put soul in Christian
music, you can be
Black and put soul in Jewish music!"
"Soul
comes out of a bad experience and being able to sing about it," Nelson
continues. "You can hear soul in Jewish cantorial chanting; the wailing
you hear in a synagogue. That is also identified as soul, because it's
what one moans and groans about a horrible experience.
Black people and
European Jews have both gone through hell in the last two centuries."
For
nearly twenty years, the Klezmatics have been the standard bearers of
politically and socially conscious party music for the head, heart, and
tuchis. The New York band has been constantly reinventing and
stretching the boundaries of the genre while staying rooted to the
source. The band recently toured their Holy Ground concert program of
Woody Guthrie's Jewish music with Arlo Guthrie, selling out New York's
Carnegie Hall and Los Angeles' Disney Hall.
"We
have a reputation as 'the klezmer band that sings,'" explains
Klezmatics singer Lorin Sklamberg. "With
Brother Moses we were able to
join with additional voices which really gave us an opportunity to do a
lot of wonderful singing together. Another exciting thing for me was
getting to sing songs I have loved for many years, but never had the
chance to sing. The title track was inspired by a version by the Golden
Gate Quartet�an African American group that started singing spirituals
in the 1920s and is still singing to this day. I knew it from my mom's
record collection when I was a kid. "The
Brother Moses CD was recorded
at a festival in Berlin, but the concept came from an evening of
Freedom Songs that took place at New York's Museum of Jewish Heritage.
The
concert united songs from Jewish and African-American traditions that
spoke to social justice, becoming a multi-cultural soundtrack to
Passover's themes of freedom from bondage. "A lot of people sing 'Let
My People Go' during Passover," says Sklamberg. "This project came out
of that. We were looking for the Old
Testament intersection of these
two musical traditions: Jewish music and
Black spirituals. Gospel and
spirituals are two different things, but musically this just evolved to
have more gospel."
"The liberation from slavery into freedom in
Egypt is the root mythical psychic event that defines Jewish people,"
says Klezmatics trumpeter Frank London.
Nelson adds, "Blacks have
always paralleled our struggles in
America with the time when Hebrews
were slaves in Egypt. And in the '60s Blacks and European Jews marched
together in Washington. A lot of this project has that context. These
are two communities that have been divided by certain political
leaders. >From that standpoint, this is really, really great. For
both communities to come together."
"When we did this program in
Berlin and began to restructure the set-list," continues London, "we
realized that we had the Passover seder encapsulated in our concert, we
just needed to re-order the songs! Starting with 'Go Down, Moses'
through the songs of liberation and welcoming the messiah, and ending
with 'Ki Loy Nue,' which is at the end of the seder. It's kind of
ironic because the word seder means sequence; it's a ritual set-list.
Beside
the cross-cultural interaction and the Passover-freedom theme, both
Nelson and the Klezmatics were struck by the compatibility of what
London calls their "architecture of building energy."
"We get
along so well because we all really deal with music from the aspect of
energy," says London. "That is such a part of gospel: how you build up
the energy in a concert or service until you get to the ecstatic point.
I love that this is implicit in Joshua's approach to music and in ours."
"The
Klezmatics are very flexible on stage," adds Nelson. "They can arrange
something right in the moment. And that allowed me to add to the fire
of creating things."
"This project really points to what we love
about New York and kind of proves a lot of my points in life," London
says. "Everyone says these essentialist things about identity, and it's
not that clear. You can't point to one thing of who you are. Each
individual, everything in the world is a complex mix."
This
final point was really driven home when gospel singer/organist Amina
Claudine Myers, who performed at the New York premiere, could not make
it to the Berlin shows and recommended her friend Kathryn Farmer, who
grew up around her father's jazz bar. "My dad liked the really soul
part of jazz; the one-foot-in-the-gutter kind of music," Farmer
explains. "That's what I was raised on." During rehearsals with the
Klezmatics, it came to light that she had been adopted and her birth
mother was Jewish. Though she was not raised Jewish (her parents were
African-American Methodists), in recent years she has studied the Torah
with other Jewish musicians and artists. "It's funny. We hired an
African-American gospel singer and we found even she has a Jewish
connection that she's still exploring," concludes London.
